Of course, not all poverty is in Africa. I am well aware that there is terrible want in many other parts of the world, in Haiti and Afghanistan, in Bolivia and Cambodia, in Calcutta and São Paolo, even in parts of Glasgow and Detroit. But compared with a generation ago, thanks chiefly to progress elsewhere, poverty has come to be concentrated in that one continent as never before. Of the ‘bottom billion’ left behind by recent booms – Paul Collier’s phrase – more than 600 million are Africans.
